Predator
Fighting our instincts takes empathy and careful thought.
If you are short on time, scroll down and read “The Honest Protestor.” It will take you about 90 seconds to read. If you like it, you can read the rest later.
Roosters and Foxes
It’s always funny to see my young children learn about and explore the world. The other day we were reading a book where a fox breaks into a chicken coop and tries to eat the chickens. Spoiler alert: the spastic rooster accidentally scares the fox away. One of my sons turned to me and said, “Daddy, why is the fox trying to get the chicken?”
I said, “If the fox doesn’t eat the chicken, then the fox will starve to death. Either the chicken dies or the fox dies, but one of them isn’t going to make it.” He said, “But I don’t want the fox to get the chicken.”
“Do you want the fox to starve to death? How would you feel if you didn’t have any food to eat?”
“But I don’t like that!”
There is something odd about how we tend to immediately side with the prey over the predator. In stories like this one with the fox and the chicken, the storyteller doesn’t have to do any work to convince the reader that the fox is the antagonist. The fox is going after an innocent chicken, so we know the fox is the antagonist. If the story were about a chicken going after an earthworm, we would know that the chicken is the antagonist.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Aesop’s fables, which my kids also love. Aesop constantly uses predator-prey relationships to impart lessons to the audience, and the predator is almost always assumed to be the antagonist.
And when I watch wildlife documentaries, I can’t help but hope that the herd of goats escapes the grasp of the wolf. It feels so natural to side with goats, and it feels devastating when the predator catches and devours its prey.
‘Splainin’
If a storyteller wants to make a predator the protagonist, then the storyteller has to do some explaining…
…I didn’t see The Lion King until I was 21 years old. I grew up in a very conservative Christian household and The Lion King was strictly verboten because it contained “new-age theology” by praising the “circle of life.” When I finally watched the movie I chuckled because it was clear that the “circle of life” wasn’t meant to brainwash children with new-age spirituality but to explain that the lions weren’t bad because they ate gazelles. The writers at Disney had to explain to the children, with the help of Sir Elton John, that it was okay for the lions to, you know, eat to survive.
The point here is that our instinct is to side with the prey, with the underdog. It takes some thought to see that the predator may not be as evil as our first reaction tells us. Automatically siding with the prey without giving it a second thought is childish.
Feelings and Reason
In my essay Quality, I wrote about a concept called “critical feeling,” which is when you become aware of your feelings, examine your feelings, and try to train them. This is, essentially, a stoic practice even if we have dressed it up with more modern language.
Examining our feelings of identification with the prey over the predator requires Empathy. We have to work to feel what it would be like to be an emaciated fox fighting for its life trying to catch a rabbit.
I am envious when I come across people who seem to have a black belt in critical feeling. The speed at which these types of people are able to see an issue from multiple angles impresses the hell out of me. They don’t come across as superior or condescending, they come across as the most reasonable types of people.
Rest in Peace
Charlie Munger, who recently passed away, was an infinity-degree black belt in critical feeling. He showed deep insights into the origin of certain feelings and demonstrated how they affected our decision-making. He knew what it felt like when an old lady begs for her job after stealing from the cash register, and he knew that *not* firing her was immoral. He knew what it felt like to accept a gift from a salesman, and how it distorted judgement, so he never accepted them. He knew what it felt like to catch an employee breaking the law and have him beg not to be turned in. And because he considered what these feelings were like, and examined how they led to bad decisions, he was known for having superb wisdom and judgment.
Munger would often talk about the importance of his upbringing in developing his moral compass. In one talk he said that the accepted community ethic when he was boy was that “It’s a moral failure to be unreasonable when you have the capacity to be reasonable.” H would often speak about the connection between being reasonable and being moral. For Charlie, being reasonable was a moral duty. But there was also an indirect relationship between morality and reason, where being irrational wasn’t just immoral on its own, but led to other immoral behaviors. In accounting, for example, he would talk about how irrational or unreasonable rules either enabled or caused moral failings in people by creating perverse incentives. For Munger, if you begin from a place of irrationality or unreason, the fall toward immorality is almost inevitable.
Commanders
The worst commanders that I have had in the military weren’t just incompetent, they were unreasonable. It’s totally possible to be incompetent in a domain but still be reasonable; you could, for example, recognize your incompetence and seek out and follow the advice of the competent. But being incompetent and unreasonable is a deadly combination.
On multiple occasions, I saw incompetence slide into immorality at varying scales. I had one commander who thought that it was reasonable for soldiers to stay at work until 2100 night after night while the company First Sergeant talked to the platoon sergeants. I approached him about this and asked, “Sir, the soldiers have been here since 0600 this morning, why are we still here? No work is happening, why don’t we just come back tomorrow?” This was met with a tirade about how I was unprofessional and wasn’t acting as an officer should. It should come as no surprise that this commander was ultimately fired for losing a radio and lying about it. He also showed zero empathy or concern for his soldiers when they were injured in training or wounded in combat, which is a moral failing.
On a much larger scale, the entire way we were fighting the war in Afghanistan was irrational. I won’t go into all my critiques here, but the way we were fighting made no logical sense on any of my three deployments. The fact the Army was fighting in an irrational and illogical way in Afghanistan was something that none of the Generals ever wanted to admit. So what did they do? They lied. They lied to the media, they lied to Congress, they lied to their soldiers, and they lied to themselves. The level of moral failing in the US Army’s officer corps during the war in Afghanistan is unfathomable, and I include myself in that. And those moral failings stemmed directly from the fact that the way we were fighting the war was irrational and unreasonable. 1
Being unreasonable isn’t the only path to immorality, but it will get you there all the same.
Returning to Predator-Prey
Because people tend to naturally side with what looks like prey, and demonize what looks like a predator, it is usually an advantage for a movement or ideology to clothe itself in the cloak of the prey. And because people are so untrained in critical feeling, or unmotivated to expend that mental energy, prey-clothed movements can very quickly gather a lot of support.
But the people who go along with prey-clothed movements are not simply dupes, they are immoral. By failing to examine their own feelings and to try and see things from the predator’s point of view (or at least what they see as a predator), they are failing to be reasonable when they have the capacity to be. And this failure to be reasonable will lead to all kinds of immoral behavior.
This is why being reasonable is so important, and why critical feeling is an absolutely essential skill. Sacrificing your reason to ideology may well be the fastest route to immorality.
The Honest Protestor
Interviewer: Thank you for speaking to me. Can you tell me why you came out to support this cause today?
Protestor: I repeat the talking points that I have heard from other people! Freedom! Democracy! Anti-This! Pro-That!
Interviewer: That’s very interesting. What are you all trying to accomplish by being here today?
Protestor: I give vague and overly generalized answers to specific questions! Slogan, slogan!
Interviewer: But have you considered the facts that seem to contradict your opinion?
Protestor: Yes, and I regurgitate the rhetoric that I read on social media! There is also this really smart person on TicTok and I parrot what they say!
Interviewer: Are you concerned by some of the rhetoric from your side concerning this issue? Many critics say it is harmful.
Protestor: What is harmful is the people who disagree with me because they are wrong and bad!
The protestor in this story has outsourced their thinking to others. This person is not being reasonable, he or she isn’t even trying to be reasonable. This person has picked a team and is all in. Now, if the leaders of this person’s team decide that what really needs to happen is some type of immoral act, like a terrorist attack, vandalism, or arson, what is the probability that our protestor will have the moral courage to resist? It’s not 0%, but it probably isn’t higher than 10%. Because this person has outsourced their reason, they have also outsourced their moral decision-making. They will go with the crowd and blow with the wind. And if the wind leads to genocide then so be it.
You don’t prevent genocide by emotionally picking one team over another; your team can always genocide the other team. You prevent genocide by being reasonable and asking, “is the thing claiming to be prey actually prey, and is the supposed predator really all that bad?”
I didn’t intend to write about Afghanistan, but it came out anyway.
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis is a great story which makes you root for the predators, because the predators are people trying to make through the Alaskan winter. It's an old story for children and is full of practical and moral lessons without beating you over the head with them. There are details about traditional hunting and foraging techniques, but the most important lesson is that we survive together, or not at all.